Today is great day - it's been a long journey since we started on Greenlight in July 2013. Bot Colony is now available on Steam Early Access http://store.steampowered.com/app/263040/.Visit the store page and please keep supporting us. We couldn't have done it without you. See you in Agrihan and a BIG THANK YOU!

Hooray! We have decided to move away from a subscription model for Bot Colony in favor of an episode-based pricing model. Check it out at www.botcolony.com/download/ .

The good news for existing customers: those who have purchased episodes in the past will be able to continue playing them indefinitely without paying a monthly membership. The episodes that they have purchased will be considered pre-ordered episodes, entitling them to the final release versions when available.

We owe a special debt of gratitude to Patrons who have purchased the 6 month and 12 month memberships. They will be upgraded for free to the Episodes 1- 6 and Episodes 1 – 12 (full game) respectively, receiving both the pre- and final releases of these episodes when they ship.

In conjunction with our move away from a subscription model, we are removing Dragon Naturally Speaking from the client software install and offering it as a separate option. This update will soon come into effect. Existing customers who signed up for the subscription model expecting Dragon to be included, and who do not wish to transition to the new model, are invited to apply for a partial refund at communitymgr@botcolony.com .

We thank our fan community for their trust and for being early supporters of the game, and we hope everyone enjoys the new pricing format for Bot Colony.

Pre-order Bot Colony

By pre-ordering episodes, you get access to the current Alpha episodes NOW, upcoming episodes when they become available (Early Access), and you lock in the final release episodes at a lower price!

You get to play the world’s first episodic adventure game using Natural Language Understanding technology, and you help steer it. You’re also becoming part of an international community of players, with whom you can exchange on the Forum.

Episodes can be purchased at the single episode price of $6.95.

There will be 3 packages available for pre-ordering (we'll be on Steam Early Access next week, and the prices may be rounded slightly to conform to Steam guidelines - below are our own website prices):
- Episodes 1 – 3 for $14.85, a saving of $6.00
- Episodes 1 – 6 for $29.70, a saving of $12.00.
- Episodes 1 – 12 for $59.40 , a saving of $34.00 (the Bot Colony novel is included).

Dragon Nuance will be available as an optional add-on for $18 (one year), $27 (two years) and sold off our website (we can't sell it through Steam as it will be subject to commission). Customers will also be able to purchase the Dragon NaturallySpeaking product, and use it in the game as well as for other applications.

Bot Colony, the first game to use Natural Language Understanding technology for dialogue with the player, became publicly available today. The game can be downloaded from www.botcolony.com/download/ for $2.95 (we were busy with the launch, but now we'll divert resources to making it available on Steam and Early Access). We invite players who are not from North America to look for their native language among the 34 language links on www.botcolony.com (they link to a native language ESL page). While Bot Colony should primarily be an exciting game, we hope people worldwide will adopt our game as a fun way to improve their English.
Please do us a favor and check the translation of the ESL page to your language. If you see errors, please notify communitymgr@northsideinc.com

Thank you for giving us your Yes! Your votes propelled Bot Colony to game #8 on Greenlight among 1,450 (at the moment it was greenlit) with 12,325 YES votes, about 2,000 more than the top 50 Greenlight average.
Whoever voted No - we learned some valuable lessons from your feedback, so it's all good - as long as there are enough Yes-es...:-)
Our artists have put together a Thank You image (look for it in Images). We plan to start our alpha-funding drive on Nov 27 on http://www.botcolony.com/download. We've also started working with Valve to make Bot Colony available on Early Access, and we hope to count you among our fans.

The article gives an idea of what it took to get the project to its current state. As things stand, it doesn't look like Kickstarter will contribute much (or at all) to Bot Colony development, we started slow and now we're kind of invisible. I invite all the people who are interested in Bot Colony to sign up on the home page of www.botcolony.com, and come back around 1 November when we'll start our Open Beta with the first two episodes. It looks like fan funding (I prefer this to crowdfunding) is the only option to move our project forward. I'm looking forward welcoming you among our players, and I hope that eventually we'll do a deal with Steam.